1. Field of Disclosure
This disclosure generally relates to the field of content publishing on the Internet, and specifically relates to image management and advertising on the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
The World Wide Web is widely used by consumers to view content related to topics of interest. Website publishers aggregate content including text, images and video in the hopes of attracting viewers to their websites. Photo agencies provide images to website publishers for use on the publishers' sites. The publishers typically pay to use these images.
The images used by publishers often contain objects of interest to a consumer. Sometimes these objects appear in images serendipitously, but often the objects are placed by marketers working on the behalf of the object retailers. The marketers have an interest in placing objects in images with celebrities and other such attractions, because such placements generate consumer interest and can boost sales and consumer engagement. For example, marketers working on behalf of a shoe manufacturer may pay a celebrity to wear a new shoe model, in the hopes that consumers will see the shoe worn by the celebrity and seek to purchase the same model.
A difficulty for marketers is that the consumers may not be able to identify objects shown in images. Images usually lack information about displayed objects, and website publishers have little, if any, incentive to provide such information in other content. Moreover, automated techniques relying on computer vision fail to properly identify objects in such images due, in part, to the nuance required to distinguish among similar-appearing objects. As a result, if the consumer is interested in, say, a pair of shoes shown in an image, the consumer might not know the brand, model or price of the shoes. Accordingly, the marketers' efforts are at least partially ineffective and the consumers are unable to purchase the objects in which they are interested.